Customer Reviews

THE KING'S GOLD (ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN ALATRISTE 4)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The fourth volume in "The Adventures of Captain Alatriste" series is set in the port city of Sevilla. The annual treasure fleet is about to arrive and a powerful clique in the King's inner circle is planning to siphon off Royal Treasure for their own nefarious purposes. Another powerful group of noblemen want to stop them. This being Spain in its decadent Gold Age, hired blades will be needed. Who better to recruit and lead a party of mercenary swordsmen recruited from Sevilla's criminal underclass than the redoubtable Captain Alatriste and his loyal companion, Inigo Balboa?

For those of us who love the scwashbucklying genre of literature, we are fortunate that Arturo Perez Reverte is producing what will be the nine volume "Adventures of Captain Alatriste" series. Perez Reverte is a fine novelists who writes serious international best sellers. In between the more serious novels, he finds the time to publish further Alatriste adventures. Each volume is well written and filled with wonderful historical details from Spain's Golden Age.

I love the series and hope to one day read all nine volumes. However, the problem with the series is that each novel is essentially eposodic in nature. There is a lack of an over-arching story in each novel. One will have to read all nine novels to learn how the story turns out. I wish that Perez Reverte had sat down like Alexandre Dumas and wrote one really long novel. Perez Reverte will do in nine novels what Dumas did in one novel. I guess this is the difference between the great novels of the Nineteenth Century and the works that are produced today for our shorter attention spans.

Yet another link the Captain Alatriste chain. It's another wicked, mysterious, thriller of a book with beautiful cities of Old and New Spain, dazzling beauties, gold glinting, swords ringing out, and shots blasting.

Another interesting twist in the Story of Inigo Balboa and Captain Alatriste, "The King's Gold" will lead Alatriste and Inigo to the money they need, but places they don't want to be. As they both delve deeper into the trap that is the nobility they form a world around them that is wholly their own, but they are beginning to have less and less control.

A definite must read for all Reverte fans and if you haven't read the Alatriste series go back to the first one, "Captain Alatriste", read up and be prepared to be sucked into a world unlike any other you have ever read about.

I made the mistake of purchasing and reading this installment of the Captain Alatriste series first. I, of course, had a somewhat difficult time picking up the characters and story line through the first couple of chapters. And then when I quickly burned through the rest of the book, I promptly made my way to the local book store to purchase more of the series! The characters are incredibly alluring and I have fallen in love with both the Captain and his buddy Inigo. Love it!

This fourth book in the Capt. Alatriste series, advances the multi-installment plot in exciting and absorbing ways. Unlike some of the other books in the series, "The King's Gold" does not involve a specific historical event, and instead focuses on Andalusia and Seville. Many of the now familiar characters appear and perform pretty much true to form in this creative adventure plot. The details about early 17th century Andalusia, exhibit prodigious research and are especially rewarding. I followed the action with maps and encyclopedia entries about the locations mentioned, although this is certainly not a prerequisite to enjoying the book. I would not read this book as a stand alone volume because Perez-Reverte does not revisit the histories of the characters that bring them logically to the events in "The King's Gold." I'm a committed fan and will now proceed to read volume five. I can't wait.

Quite an accomplishment. Reverte's follow-up to the saga of Altriste continues into the backdrop of 16th and 17th century Spain. Historically accurate and a splendidly good read.

"The King's Gold" is the fourth episode in Perez-Reverte's saga of Diego Alatriste, 17th Century Spanish sword-for-hire. Like previous books in the series, this story focuses on a discrete period of time (a week in 1626), when Captain Alatriste and his stalwart ward/apprentice, Inigo Balboa, have just returned from a hard-scrabble deployment in the Netherlands where they were in the midst of brutal fighting against Dutch Protestants. Returning to Spain with empty pockets and almost in rags, they are offered a dangerous assignment in the service of the Spanish throne that could turn their fortunes around quickly, if they manage to survive.

The story line has its interests and charms, but as in most episodes of the Alatriste series, the greater enjoyment is in the backdrop and descriptions of the characters. The author's extraordinary research into the Spanish empire of the time, its court, 17th Century city life, naval shipping and much more, gives the reader a rich and complex picture that the story plays against. Perez-Reverte's language is clever and often elegant, and is highly effective in providing the reader with a further sense of the period. There are few false notes in the author's descriptions of how the characters are clothed, what they eating and drinking, how they cope with the problems of living rough, and how the city of Seville looked and functioned in 1626.

Perez-Reverte's observations on the political and social conditions of the Spanish state in the 17th Century are razor sharp and authentic sounding. Coming full circle, it is those conditions that shape the series' protagonist, Alatriste, and set virtually all of the context for his adventures.

"The King's Gold" is a welcome and highly enjoyable installment to masterful series. It has the added plus of leaving the good Captain Alatriste in an appreciably better material situation by the end of the story. Bring on number five!

This is the 5th book by Perez Reverte that I have read. I guess that I am a fan. I thought the Kings Gold was a case study in small group leadership during combat. Both good and bad! A book club discussion among military leaders would be interesting. I am looking forward to the next book in the series. Inigo is being set up for his own series and that should be a bit more upscale. The captain has lost his luster and is revealed as a thug. I am captured by Perez Reverte's style of writing. A novel written in a modern style set in the 17th century. The book is spiced with cultural tidbits. I read the print version but in a kindle edition I could look up some of the words that are unfamiliar. This is a good book but it is not The Queen of the South.
The book would greatly improved with a map.

Fascinating storytelling from the golden age of the Spanish Empire, which also coincides with the Catholic wars against the Reformation waged by the Hapsburgs across Europe. English story-telling naturally lacks Roman Catholic heroes, so it's really fun to have this imagined from that side instead. For a person who is captivated either by that historic conflict which ended with Westphalia, or the story of the manufacture and trade in the famed Spanish coins called "escudos d'or" or silver "reales," this novel delights.

Apparently, this is translated from Arturo Perez-Reverte's original Spanish. If so then the translator, unnamed in the credits, deserves praise as well because the style of English prose is elegant, poised, and easy. It uses appropriate words for archaic items such as "buff coat" a sort of leather armor, without using archaic grammer or stylings. This is preferable to the reverse, where a foreign tongue is sometimes represented awkwardly through pretentious dialogue. No such offense here; rather, the prose of this novel is lean and agile, like the hero "Captain Alatriste."

The action of the book proceeds with a good pace. There is sufficient backround in the beginning for the book to stand alone, which is desirable in a series. But the backround is not overmuch presented before the conflict nor does the action wait for anything. Timing in a novel helps engage the reader. I found the pace of the book as a whole to be quite similar to the pace of a fencing bout, which is appropriate considering the many detailed rapier combats described in the book, precisely as suggested by the hilt depicted on the dustcover of the book.

Compared to the overall genre of historical fiction, this novel has a certain economy, that presents historical detail only as necessary and integral to the plot and action. There is little undisciplined indulgence into history as such. What surplus period detail there is contributes to the general ambience and aids the reader's enjoyment.

A really wonderful novel and I will certainly pick up more by the author, Arturo Perez-Reverte.

After The Sun Over Breda (Captain Alatriste (Plume Books)) I had sworn off reading further in the adventures of Perez-Reverte's swashbuckling hero, Diego Alatriste, the enigmatic soldier-of-fortune and "best swordsman in all Madrid". That earlier book had been too dry and unfocused for my taste and I thought Alatriste had begun to run on empty. But, finding this one remaindered (along with the next in the series), I broke down and bought them anyway, being a sucker for adventure and derring do. In the current work, Alatriste (and his creator, Arturo Perez-Reverte) returns to a faster pace, albeit with the continued interruption of the narrator, Inigo Balboa's, reflections on the decline of a once glorious Spain due to the rampant replacement of the old traditions of honor and nobility with greed, pettiness and an unfortunate indifference to violence and all things corrupt. Along the way we get the usual helpings of old Spanish verse intended to throw light on the times and lend the narrative veracity. Unfortunately, as they have sometimes done in the earlier novels in this series, they tend to slow down the narrative pace more often than not.

In this book's adventure, the self-made captain and his young ward Inigo, now a veteran of war thanks to his stint in Breda and a competent swordsman in his own right, are called upon to gather a crew of hard cases and cutthroats to undertake a certain mission for a high placed government official who is close to the king. The Spanish treasure fleet is due in from the New World, filled with the gold and silver, dug and smelted by the enslaved labor force in the Spanish colonies. The bulk of this wealth, Inigo tells us, is destined to fill the coffers of Spain's many lenders but on board one of the ships is another quite secret stash, neither declared nor taxed for the benefit of king and country, which no one will miss (because it officially doesn't exist) but which the king's top official thinks would do far more good in the king's own hands.

It falls to Captain Alatriste to engineer the theft in a fashion untraceable to the king himself but which may be the death of the expendable swordsman and thugs, Alatriste must recruit. The bulk of the tale is taken up with the Captain's tour of the underbelly of old Seville in search of a suitable force while, along the way, young Inigo, still hormonally challenged by his attraction to the beautiful child-woman Angelica de Alquezar, niece to a high court official, is drawn once more into an assignation with the young lovely, like a moth to flame. Inigo agrees to a secret meeting, despite her intimations that he must risk his life to do so. But what is life to a sixteen year old veteran of Spain's war in Flanders when there is such a prize to be won?

As in the previous books the deadly Italian assassin, Gualterio Malatesta, makes his appearance, this time in two brief cameos. A hired henchman of Alatriste's blood enemy at court, Malatesta once more strides onto the stage in all black garb, complete with a long twirling moustache, a pockmarked complexion and the sinister whistling that is his trademark, all providing ample evidence of the man's dangerous villainy. And once more Alatriste will nearly (but not quite) dispatch him, presumably leaving him whole enough for yet another go at the inimitable captain in some future episode.

On balance this one is enriched by Perez-Reverte's highly intelligent prose, his vivid (if often overdone) depiction of the time and era of his tale and his literary references (though these still teeter uncertainly on the threshold of ovverkill). The world weary ennui of the otherwise intensely loyal and honorable Captain (who is really no captain at all) adds a certain dimension to an otherwise invincible hero.

This book is better than its predecessor but still suffers from too much verbiage and detail. And yet I rather liked it, in the end, despite that.

Stuart W. Mirsky

I love the Adventures of Capitan Alatriste. I have read those books, all of them about four times in the original language: Spanish. I decided to buy them for my husband, who doesn't speak Spanish, so he can learn and understand why Mexicans are the way we are. Not only because the different ways, but also because what we have as a historical background.